American Gothic was painted in 1930 by Iowa artist Grant Wood after he saw and sketched the house and imagined the kind of people who would live there. The painting is said to represent a father and his daughter, with their placement and expressions suggesting a father defending his daughter and the daughter's reluctant submission. Signs of some wealth appear in her broach, his collar stud, and the one horse barn, although in reality the barn never existed the way Wood painted it and the church steeple never existed at all. Wood used his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as models and promised they would not be recognized. His sister was disguised somewhat by changing the shape of her face, but many recognized Dr. McKeeby, which hurt Wood and McKeeby's friendship. The two never posed together in front of the house and never actually met until they posed for a photograph 12 years later. In the fall of 1930, Wood submitted the painting to the Art Institute of Chicago's Forty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, where it won the bronze medal. He received $300 in prize money, and the Friends of American Art at the institute purchased it for an additional $300, for a total of $600, about $8,000 in today's money. The painting then toured across the country and appeared in newspapers. Art critics were divided over Wood's new style, with some seeing it as too caricature-like, illustrative, and cartoonish, while others saw it as the emergence of truly American art. Many people in Iowa and the Midwest were offended and insulted by how they were portrayed, while others were proud to have such a famous Iowan artist regardless of how the painting made them look. American Gothic was one of the first paintings in the style for which Wood became known, a style often characterized by rounded trees, rolling hills, and repeating shapes and patterns, including triangles in the house and barn roof, circles in the glasses, apron pattern, and trees, hayfork forms in the shirt, overalls, faces, and window, rectangles in the siding and windows, and patterns in the fabric of the apron and curtain.